Criminals on the International Criminal Court By Thomas C. Mountain

When US National Security Advisor John “The Walrus” Bolton threatened the International Criminal Court with USAmerican sanctions many of us here in Africa cheered, long having given up hope that the ICC would ever be held to even the slightest account, least of all for its crimes against our continent.The Peoples’ Indictment against the ICC is a long one – running from its failures to indict to the criminal indictments it issued.Lets start with the Horn of Africa, where the ICC never indicted anyone for the genocidal blockade of food and medicine against the people of the occupied Ogaden in today’s Ethiopia by the former TPLF regime from 2007 until this year – during a series of famines unprecedented in the regions history. The Ogaden’s Somali children in their hundreds of thousands starved to death while international food aid was used to pay the salaries of the LIYU Police death squads aka “the wheat police”.Yet the ICC indicted Sudanese President Omar Al Bashir for “war crimes” and “crimes against humanity” in Dafur during an all too obviously attempted coup d’eta. Saddam Hussein, Muhamar Gaddafi…Omar Al Bashir, all aboard when it comes to demonizing the latest ‘“Islamic/Arab Terrorist Threat”- better yet a black Islamic terrorist.The problem is that while the ICC was vilifying Bashir for alleged crimes in Dafur the Sudanese President was playing a critical role in the success of the Dafur relief effort, what is still considered the most successful major International Aid intervention ever.

So while the ICC was indicting Sudan’s President for the deaths of “hundreds of thousands” and even genocide, eyewitness testimony from Dafur credits him with just the opposite, that Bashir was helping to save hundreds of thousands of lives through active support for the relief effort, personally directing government logistical and security efforts without which the UN admits it could not have succeeded.The ICC indicted Bashir when they should have been indicting the Ethiopian regime and were using the Dafur indictments to keep international attention from being focussed on the real genocide taking place in the Ogaden.Genocide by starvation is cost effective and “deniable”, low risk mass murder, you know, “solving the Somali problem” and since the ICC knows about this, it is making them criminally complicit.Next door to the Somali Ogaden, in the Federal Republic of Somalia at least one million children under five years old have starved to death in a series of droughts and famines since 2011.According to UN’s FAO statistical projections between November 2015 and April 2016 upwards of 400,000 Somali children died of starvation. This following the UN’s own estimation that 250,000 children starved to death from 2011-2012. So many deaths because not enough food aid was delivered? UNICEF just didn’t have the money? And nobody, nobody has been indicted for this series of genocides, in spite of the fact that this is public knowledge?This has been a war on the Somali people directed by former senior US intelligence leaders running the UN “relief operations” – i.e. UNICEF and Anthony Lake, that continues as I write – a war of hunger and famine to bring a people to their knees.Isn’t this the job of the ICC – to investigate and prosecute?What about Libya, where all the charges against Gaddafi were proven to be fabricated and an entire country attacked and plunged into chaos and anarchy, tens of thousands killed and hundreds of thousands of black Libyans ethnically cleansed from their homes? What about the thousands of black Africans guest workers lynched by racist Arab militias? Not a word of protest from the ICC to this day, let alone indictments against Sarkozy, Gordon Brown, Barack Obama, Susan Rice or the Queen of Chaos herself, Hillary Clinton.So, when “The Walrus”, National Security Advisor to President Trump threatens the ICC with sanctions, we here in Africa can hardly help but smile, who knows, maybe one day Africa will finally see some justice done.(*) Thomas C. Mountain is an independent journalist in Eritrea, living and reporting from there since 2006.